Organizations such as on-line retailers, Internet service providers, search providers, financial institutions, universities and other computing-intensive organizations often utilize large-scale computing facilities or data centers to conduct computer operations. Such data centers house and accommodate a large amount of computing systems to process, store and exchange data as needed to carry out an organization's operations. Typically, these computing systems are maintained in racks, which provide power, networking and other supporting functionality to each separate computing system within a respective rack. Power is supplied to each rack from a primary power system, such as from a utility power feed entering the data center. Due to an expectation that data centers always be up and running, data centers generally also include a backup or reserve power system that can supply power to the racks and computing systems in case of a failure in the primary power system.
Various problems sometimes exist, however, with the implementation and use of such power systems.